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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Lighting Out for the Territory

Lighting Out for the Territory

Morris, Roy, Jr.

Paperback

Series: Simon & Schuster America Collection

Literary FiguresCivil War Period (1850-1877)

ISBN10: 1416598677
ISBN13: 9781416598671
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: Mar 15 2011
Pages: 304
Weight: 0.61
Height: 0.90 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.30
Language: English
An action-packed and often hilarious story of Samuel Clemens from his journey to the Wild West as an ex-Confederate guerrilla and unemployed riverboat pilot to becoming celebrated American author Mark Twain.

In the very last paragraph of Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the title character gloomily reckons that it's time to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest. Tom Sawyer's Aunt Sally is trying to sivilize him, and Huck Finn can't stand it--he's been there before.

It's a decision Huck's creator already had made, albeit for somewhat different reasons, a quarter of a century earlier. He wasn't even Mark Twain then, but as Huck might have said, That ain't no matter. With the Civil War spreading across his native Missouri, twenty-five-year-old Samuel Clemens, suddenly out of work as a Mississippi riverboat pilot, gladly accepted his brother Orion's offer to join him in Nevada Territory, far from the crimsoned battlefields of war.

A rollicking, hilarious stagecoach journey across the Great Plains and over the Rocky Mountains was just the beginning of a nearly six-year-long odyssey that took Samuel Clemens from St. Joseph, Missouri, to Hawaii, with lengthy stopovers in Virginia City, Nevada, and San Francisco. By the time it was over, he would find himself reborn as Mark Twain, America's best-loved, most influential writer. The trouble, as he famously promised, had begun.

With a pitch-perfect blend of appreciative humor and critical authority, acclaimed literary biographer Roy Morris, Jr., sheds new light on this crucial but still largely unexamined period in Mark Twain's life. Morris carefully sorts fact from fiction--never an easy task when dealing with Twain--to tell the story of a young genius finding his voice in the ramshackle mining camps, boomtowns, and newspaper offices of the wild and woolly West, while the Civil War rages half a continent away.

With the frequent help of Twain's own words, Morris follows his subject on a winding journey of self-discovery filled with high adventure and low comedy, as Clemens/Twain dodges Indians and gunfighters, receives marriage advice from Brigham Young, burns down a mountain with a frying pan, gets claim-jumped by rival miners, narrowly avoids fighting a duel, hikes across the floor of an active volcano, becomes one of the first white men to try the ancient Hawaiian sport of surfing, and writes his first great literary success, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.

Lighting Out for the Territory is a fascinating, even inspiring, account of how an unemployed riverboat pilot, would-be Confederate guerrilla, failed prospector, neophyte newspaper reporter, and parttime San Francisco aesthete reinvented himself as America's most famous and beloved writer. It's a good story, and mostly true--with some stretchers thrown in for good measure.

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